This is one happy bunch of Spotscalers that just received a permission to perform camera surveillance in Sweden. If you didn’t follow the Swedish news these past months you might be wondering why we need a permission like that. In October there was a Supreme Court ruling that defined that flying with a camera on a UAV is considered to be camera surveillance.

So now, with our permission, there’s nothing stopping us and our local drone operators to create more beautiful 3D models!

We are very proud to have signed a strategic agreement with NCC, Sweden’s third largest construction company. NCC have had drone operations within the company for the last 4 years, starting out with building their own UAV platform from scratch. Today they have 20 certified pilots within the organization that serve the projects with easy access to volumetric studies, traditional ortho photos, point clouds and 3D maps. The latest addition in their services is high resolution 3D models of buildings from Spotscale and the Spotplanner application for real estate projects.

After a few hours of flying and processing on the Spotscale cloud, NCC’s UAV pilots can serve real estate developers with the data they need and an easy, visual tool for project meetings.

Architects and designers can use the 3D model on their format of choice. Spotplanner can then be used again to make the new 3D-design combined with the original 3D-model easy accessed for all stake holders over the web.

At Spotscale we strive to make the best 3D reconstruction service possible. With the Spotscale Cloud we’ll make our processing available to UAV operations around the world. We will keep refining the service with functionality of relevance to professionals in real estate development, real estate construction and real estate maintenance. And we want to be the go-to-choice for photogrammetry services and web tools when it comes to buildings in 3D.

Our friend and adventurer Sam Cossman put an expedition together with GE to make the worlds first connected volcano. A team of volcanologists, filmmakers, drone operators and other experts spent several weeks this summer connecting IoT sensors to the Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua. The Masaya Volcano is an active volcano with a boiling lava lake threatening the nearby town of Masaya. The goal with mounting IoT-sensors and monitoring the volcano in real time is to predict eruptions as well as to spread information and experiences of a live volcano. At Spotscale we were happy to help out with 3D reconstruction of the volcano from the safety of our office in Linköping, quite excited when we got footage like this sent to us:-) The 3D-model will be part of interactive experiences of the volcano. Stay tuned!

Cooking on the Spotscale cloud right now is a large 3D model of central Norrköping, our neighboring town. With 150 000 images processed we’ll get an extremely detailed model that can be viewed from alla angles, from street to rooftops. An 285 000 m2 urban scene that can be experiences in VR, on surface table or in a computer game. Walk on the streets or fly through.

The model will be available for companies within the Visual Sweden project for various simulations and visualizations.